Wednesday, November 05, 2008

Trying Ed Love's Head Bobs at Spumco

I did a couple Ranger Smith cartoons for Cartoon Network eons ago and tried using a bunch of old HB lmied animation techniques. In this scene, I used an Ed Love theory that I had seen in many Huckleberry Hound and Flintstone cartoons. This was the first time I tried it.

I created my basic 3 keys, Here's the down pose.

This is a middle pose.

Here is the up pose. - with the signature neck hotdog that Ed Love uses.

I also made inbetweens between these poses, but didn't always use them or sometimes used them as keys for lesser accents. This is an inbetween below. I tried to make it all fit the dialogue track (voiced by Steve Worth!) another inbetween...

Here's the up key again with a different mouth.

By using a small handful of head key positions and some inbetweens, you can have a big variety of expressions and levels of accents. ( I can't upload the whole scene here, because it will be too big. I'll put up 2 pieces to give you the idea.)

16 comments:

Your Ranger Smith cartoons are some of the funniest cartoons ever made in limited animation. Anybody I've ever known who has seen those cartoons LOVES them! The same with Weekend Pussy Hunt. It goes to show that good characters, good voices, good drawings, and good direction can still make great cartoons, regardless of low budgets. So I wonder why shows that have more than 10 billion times bigger budgets than Yogi Bear aren't even a billionth of a fraction as memorable. There needs to be more Johns and Steve Worths in the world.

BTW, There seems to be quite a few non-Ren & Stimpy John K classics that really need to be put on dvd some day. Any possible chance of an official Ranger Smith/Weekend Pussy Hunt/miscellaneous/etc. John K cartoon collection some day? I can dream, can't I?

That "croup" line is a great example, John! I see what you meant about using the inbetweens as keys for smaller accents. The little head shake at the word "who..." is a brilliant example of getting the most out of a few drawings.

I agree with the first two comments - These Ranger Smith cartoons were great fun, and I'd love to see them on DVD!

I saw boo boo goes wild like a week ago and I remembered watching as a kid. Totally eefed me up when boo boo freaked, but I watched the whole thing! With my parents! It was gross, funny, excellent in general. and we loved it.

off point here, has anyone seen the triplets of Belleville? It looks very strange to me, and I don't know what to really think of it.

Just how ancient are these? I'll admit it's only within the last year that I've been catching up with all things John K, yet from my standpoint these Ranger Smith's are fairly new. 2000 was like yesterday, (I must be getting old).

Sheesh, just can't get with the Flash stuff, man. It's a few steps from audio greeting-cards.

I saw "The Triplets of Belleville" (Les Triplettes de Belleville) in the theater years ago. I believe it was the first PG-13 animated feature to be nominated for an oscar.

Anyway, it was praised for it's retro style. It was a co-production between France, Belgium, and Canada. The only thing I can say is that...it looks like it. It has a very French/European feeling to the animation. John K. can probably elaborate on this much better than I can, but there's an aesthetic to it that is entirely European that an American viewer can pick up on almost instantly. The same way that if you were to watch "City of Lost Children" or "Delicatessen" with the sound off, you would still know they were French films.

Yet, it also was a product of it's time with both American (Bakshi-esque movements and design) and Japanese (Miyazaki-esque extremely detailed and colored backgrounds) influences.

Thanks for bringing up the film! I had forgotten about this movie and am curious to revisit it. At the time it had a lot of hype because Europe doesn't produce many animated features, and the movie is full of things that pretentious film snobs love (no dialogue, making fun of fat and oafish Americas, etc.). So, it will be interesting to re-watch the film without all the blind critical praise.

thanks for that, I've been watching clips from it, and the way people talk about it, doesn't seem true to me. I mean the way they draw the characters is nice and all but I don't see retro. the way it's colored makes it look old though.